


standing behind you (maybe in tights)

by ghostsoldier



Category: Bully: Scholarship Edition
Genre: Boarding School, Canon-Typical Violence, First Kiss, High School, Humor, M/M, pirates vs. ninjas
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-29
Updated: 2012-08-29
Packaged: 2017-11-13 03:49:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,289
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/499138
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ghostsoldier/pseuds/ghostsoldier
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which a ninja engages his ancient enemy, and a pirate loses his leg.</p>
            </blockquote>





	standing behind you (maybe in tights)

**Author's Note:**

> It turns out that Ethan didn't dress as a ninja for Halloween, but I'm pretending for the sake of this story that he did. Originally written and posted in 2007.

The ninja had known this day would come. He’d known it from the first moment he’d seen that cocky asshole pirate stalking around like he owned the place, like he was _tough_. The ninja knew better -- ninjas always knew these things, and anyway, who’d ever heard of a short pirate with a pompadour? -- but he bided his time. Ninjas didn’t start things, but they sure as hell finished them.  
  
He could wait.  
  
The pirate, for his part, did exactly as the ninja expected. Sure, most days he didn’t _look_ like a pirate, but the ninja knew better. It wasn’t the clothes that made the man, it was something underneath your skin, something in your blood. Hell, he himself wore jeans and a white shirt most days, but he was a ninja through and through, and even when the pirate stuck to his leather jacket and his motorcycle boots, his slicked-back hair, the ninja could still see the pirate hat and the eye-patch in his mind’s eye. And the way the pirate looked at him sometimes, the ninja knew he was seeing the black mask, the bowstaff. The day of reckoning was at hand. It was only a matter of time.  
  
It had started on Halloween. Some stupid werewolf was throwing eggs and the ninja found himself taking shelter behind a trashcan -- a little undignified for a ninja, maybe, but the costume was a bitch to wash and he didn’t have the money to get it dry-cleaned -- when to his utter shock, a _pirate_ of all things threw a firecracker at the werewolf and stood there laughing when he ran away.  
  
A pirate. The ninja’s mortal enemy. He stood.  
  
“Ha! Ya big meathead!” The pirate was wholly absorbed in taunting his fleeing enemy and didn’t notice as the ninja stepped around the trash can and came forward. Around them, students and monsters alike swarmed, all hell and chaos breaking loose, firecrackers and bottle rockets, stink bombs, eggs, but the ninja had eyes for only one. One man, one foe.   
  
One pirate.  
  
“Put that in your pipe and smoke it!” the pirate jeered. He snickered to himself and tossed an unlit firecracker from hand to hand, turned…and stopped. His eyes narrowed, and without taking his gaze from the ninja, he slid the firecracker back into the pocket of his frock coat and cracked his knuckles.  
  
“ _You_ ,” he said.  
  
The ninja tilted his head back and met the pirate’s gaze, fearless. “Me.”  
  
Their eyes locked. The air crackled with energy. _This_ , the fight of fights, the beat-down to end all beat-downs. The ninja recognized the pirate, had seen him around, his stupid pretty-boy jaunt, his slick red hair; they’d even tussled on occasion, but he’d never realized just how deep their enmity ran until this moment, and they were both tense, his own muscles taut, ready, the pirate’s fingers flexing, and all it would take was a blink, a breath, the tiniest slip to prompt one of them into action and then the ultimate battle would be joined, the...  
  
The ninja grunted in surprise as someone slammed sideways into him.  
  
“Ethan! Dude!” the someone said. He grabbed the ninja’s shoulders, laughing breathlessly, eyes wide. He was covered in egg and stunk like the chemistry lab. In his peripheral vision, the ninja saw the pirate roll his eyes.   
  
Ethan sighed. “Wade, I’m kinda busy right now.”  
  
“No, this is awesome!” Wade grabbed his arm and started to drag him off, still laughing. “Russell’s gone crazy, dude! He’s trying to see how many nerds he can fit into a trash can, and now the jocks are getting in on it and it’s fucking _insane_ , man, you gotta come see…”  
  
Ethan glanced over his shoulder. The pirate, Vance, smirked, tipped his hat, and flipped him the bird, and Ethan felt the ancient fury simmer in him once more. Their engagement would be a little delayed, perhaps, but this wasn’t over by a long shot.  
  
The pirate was going down.  
  
***   
  
It was fate. It had to be. After that night, the ninja saw the pirate everywhere -- outside of class, in the cafeteria, waiting in line at the movie theater -- which either meant the pirate was stalking him, or he was unconsciously stalking the pirate. It got his blood up, which wasn’t the ninja way. Ninjas were calm, cool, serene. A ninja had to wait for his enemy to come to _him_ , because ninjas weren’t in the way of picking fights. Not even with pirates.  
  
The pirate…smirked at him a lot. Once, he even winked. Ninjas didn’t get winked at, especially not when the person doing the winking was a short, punk-ass pirate who sauntered around and kept watching the ninja all smug. Like he _knew_ him. The ninja fumed and watched him right back. It wasn't very ninja-like to imagine beating the snot out of him, but it sure as hell made him feel better about the winking.  
  
One day, in chemistry class, the ninja was trying to figure out where he’d made the error in his calculations when someone tapped him on the arm. He looked up to see Beatrice smiling nervously at him from behind her glasses.  
  
“Vance said I should give you this,” she said. There was a piece of folded notebook paper in her hands. Ethan took it.  
  
 _I know what you are,_ Vance had written. His writing was messy, boyish. Exactly the sort of writing Ethan would expect from a pirate. He glared at Vance, who was slouched on his stool two tables over, rapidly drumming his pencils on the lab counter. He was obviously letting his lab partner do all the work, and when he seemed to sense Ethan looking at him, he straightened a little and turned his head. Their eyes met.  
  
 _I know what you are too,_ Ethan wrote in neat capital letters. He refolded the paper and handed it to Beatrice, and refused to look at Vance until he felt another tap on his arm and Beatrice apologetically handed him the paper again.  
  
Ethan wasn’t normally in the business of feeling sorry for nerds -- not even the girls -- but it had to suck having a pirate as a lab partner.  
  
Vance had written, _What are you gonna do about it?_  
  
Ethan’s eyes narrowed. _We settle this_ , he wrote. _Like men._  
  
This time, he watched as Vance read over his reply. The other boy’s lips moved and his brow furrowed, and then he abruptly crumpled the paper into a ball and dropped it to the tile floor. “Just name the time and place, ya kung-fu fairy,” he said out loud. His grin was a challenge and a threat. “I’ll be there.”   
  
***  
  
Unfortunately, the pirate kept shooting down the ninja’s suggestions. It was quite aggravating.  
  
“Out by the observatory,” said the ninja. They were standing outside the cafeteria, a neutral location if he ever saw one. The pirate kept chatting with people as they walked by and it was making their conversation a lot more difficult.  
  
“Are you freakin’ kidding me?” the pirate said derisively. He slid a comb through his hair and smoothed a few renegade strands back into place. “That’s nerd territory.”  
  
The ninja folded his arms over his chest. “What do _you_ suggest?”  
  
“The gardens?”  
  
“In the Vale? That’s even worse than the observatory!”  
  
The pirate smirked. “Yeah, but we could beat up a few trust fund babies while we’re out there.”  
  
“No way.”   
  
“Pfft. _Fine_. Wuss.” The pirate shoved his hands into his pockets and slouched back against the drink machine.  
  
“The beach?” said the ninja.  
  
The pirate looked thoughtful. “The one out by Blue Skies? No one ever goes there.”  
  
“Exactly. We’d have privacy.”  
  
The pirate’s grin was lean and lazy, all hooded eyes and even white teeth. The ninja didn’t know what to make of it.  
  
The pirate said, “Yarrr.”  
  
***  
  
They set the terms. No spectators. No weapons. No props. It was to be the two of them and their fists, nothing more, and while they both knew that a _real_ contest between them would involve every sort of weapon they could get their hands on, plastic throwing stars and a tin sword probably weren’t going to affect the final outcome all that much. It was easier to just leave them behind and go at it the old-fashioned way.  
  
The ninja was the first to arrive. He’d taken his bike -- or, rather, he’d taken _someone’s_ bike -- and cut through the tunnels around the back of the school, sprinting the bike over uneven ground, the wind a cold rush against his face. His mask was tucked into his belt; he pulled it over his head once he’d reached the sandbar and dumped the bike at the edge of it.  
  
The pirate showed up about five minutes later, coming from the industrial park in the opposite direction. He rode like all hell was after him and his coat streamed behind him. When the bike hit the sand, he jumped off without slowing, and his rakish, cocky grin was already firmly in place.  
  
“You’re early,” he called.  
  
The ninja smiled behind his mask. “And you’re not.”  
  
He watched as the pirate paused to strap on his peg leg. There was something…different about him, the ninja thought, and it took him a moment to figure out what it was.   
  
“Where’s your hat?” he asked.  
  
The cocky grin slipped a little. “Freakin’ Hopkins took it,” the pirate said. He adjusted the navy blue bandanna he’d tied around his head. “I made do.”  
  
Actually, the bandanna was a good look for him, not that the ninja would ever say so. The pirate hat had made him appear taller, yes, but it also overwhelmed his face -- all you really saw was the hat. The bandanna, on the other hand, nicely offset the color of the hair underneath and drew more attention to the smirk and the eye-patch.  
  
Not that the ninja noticed those kinds of things.   
  
The sand shifted underneath his feet as they walked towards each other.   
  
For all his earlier talk of settling their score like men, the ninja wasn't accustomed to fighting this way, meeting out in the open face to face, sizing each other up before the engagement. Waiting was more his style. Waiting, the element of surprise. This was the honorable way to settle things, but the pirate fought this way all the time and the ninja felt slightly out of his element.  
  
But even though he had the advantage now, it wouldn’t last. After all, the pirate relied too heavily on his weapons, which they'd already agreed not to use. The ninja was faster, heavier, taller. He was confident. And as they stood facing each other in the sand, each daring the other to be the first to move, the ninja knew from the anticipatory prickle in his stomach that _he_ would be the first, risk be damned, because he was quick, he was tough, he was...  
  
The pirate ducked his first jab, countered with a quick strike of his own that he easily blocked. Another. Another. The pirate was fast, but the ninja was faster. Almost lazily, he batted away another punch and then jabbed the pirate hard in the solar plexus, felt a grim rush of satisfaction as he grunted in surprise and gasped, "Oh, you _fucker_."  
  
"We can end this, you know," the ninja said. He dodged one of the pirate's kicks and hit him again, this time in the shoulder. Moved in, pressing the advantage, forcing him backwards over the uneven sand. The pirate’s breath was coming fast; the pace he’d set was costing him. "You're already getting tired."  
  
"Tired?" The pirate's smile was a little unsettling, given the circumstances. "Buddy-boy," the pirate said, "you ain't seen nothin'. I'm just _playin'_ with you." And the ninja realized -- a moment too late -- that the pirate knew what he was doing after all, because he'd gotten the ninja overconfident and lured him in, and now he could fight back _his_ way. Which he did, by kneeing the ninja as hard as he could in the stomach.  
  
"Ffffffff--!" The ninja grimaced, his eyes going wide with startled pain. When had he last fought someone who knew how to fight back?  
  
"Tired, huh?" Now the blows were raining down fast, and the ninja had to collect himself quickly in order to fend him off. "Tired? I'll show you freakin' tired." He lashed out with a kick, which would've landed solidly if the ninja hadn't been paying attention, but it was easy enough to grab the pirate’s leg, twist, and dump him onto the sand. He was back up in an instant, but the fire was in his eyes now.  
  
The ninja had knocked him down, the equivalent of drawing first blood.  
  
 _Now_ it was on.  
  
How long they fought, the ninja wasn't sure. His lungs burned, he knew that much, and he was glad the mask kept the sweat out of his eyes. The pirate was breathing hard too, and his teeth were bared, whether in a grin or a grimace, the ninja couldn't quite tell. To his surprise, they were rather evenly matched, because what the pirate lacked in speed and discipline he made up for in sheer, relentless fury, and every time the ninja managed to get him down, he popped right back up again. He was random, completely unpredictable. For the first time in a long time, the ninja realized he might not actually win this one.  
  
He couldn't remember the last time he'd had this much fun.  
  
At least, that was the case until the pirate took off his peg leg and hit him with it, and all thoughts of amusement vanished in the face of Ethan's righteous indignation. He was _livid_. "HEY!"   
  
Vance hit him with the leg again, and he barely managed to block it in time. "Not fair! We agreed no props, greaseball!"  
  
"This ain't a prop," Vance said. "It's my friggin' leg!" The blow landed this time, and Ethan growled, grabbed the leg, and hung on for dear life.  
  
"It's not your real leg, asshole," he gritted. "It's a _fake_ , which means it's a prop, which means you're _cheating_." He wrenched at it, hard, and Vance was almost thrown, but they were both holding the leg too tightly and neither one went over. For several minutes, they grappled for it, snarling wordlessly at each other, until Vance finally came within range and Ethan managed a good sideways kick to his knee. Vance yelped and went down. Ethan immediately yanked the leg away and started to hit him with it.  
  
"Don't...cheat...a...NINJA!"   
  
Each word was punctuated by a blow with the leg, until Vance launched himself off the sand in a wild, flying tackle. His shoulder connected with Ethan's stomach and the peg leg went flying, and both boys landed in the sand, all honorable fighting forgotten as they each tried to be the one to knee the other in the groin first.  
  
However. Ethan was too agile for that, and Vance was a lot more slippery than he looked. Mostly, they just rolled around on the sand a lot and tried to pin each other without much luck either way, and they probably would've continued like that for a while if not for the flailing elbow that caught Ethan in the face. He yelled in pain and surprise, and Vance immediately stopped fighting.  
  
"Hey," he said. He propped himself up on his palms, eye-patch flipped up, bandanna askew, sand and who knew what else stuck to the side of his face. "Are you okay?"  
  
Ethan clutched at his nose. "Agh. Thad was by _dose_ , you dubass!"  
  
Vance rolled off of him and sat up. "Sorry," he said. He stripped off the bandanna and the eye-patch, and Ethan was grouchily pleased to see that the greaser’s normally perfect hair was flat in places and sticking straight up in others. There was _sand_ in it.   
  
Then again, the sand was kind of everywhere, including the inside of his own mask. He peeled it off and let it fall to the ground next to him.  
  
“S’all right,” he said. He touched his nose and winced, then jumped when he felt warm fingers on his chin. “What--?”  
  
“Lemme see,” Vance said. He frowned and gently turned Ethan’s head one way, then the other. This close, his eyes were a startling shade of green.   
  
“Well,” he said finally, “it don’t look broken.” He shot Ethan a lopsided smile and sat back again. “And I know from broken noses, believe me.”  
  
Ethan laughed ruefully. “Yeah, me too.”   
  
For a few minutes, they were quiet, both of them getting their breath back as they watched the wavelets lap at the shore. Ethan was gradually becoming aware of sand in other places too, and from the way Vance was shifting next to him, he suspected there was a good deal of sand underneath the pirate coat as well. For all that his nose hurt like a bitch, he felt weirdly calm. Here he was, in full ninja costume, fighting with a _pirate_ of all things, and he felt more relaxed than he could remember in a long time. Maybe it was the endorphins.  
  
Vance had pretty eyes.  
  
“So,” Ethan said, a little too loudly. “What now? Do we keep going, call it a day, what?”  
  
Vance shrugged. “Your call, ninja-boy. You’re the one with the busted nose, not me.”  
  
Ethan flopped back onto the sand. “Five more minutes,” he said. “Give me five more minutes, and then I’m gonna kick your ass.”  
  
“Ha! Dream on.” Vance flopped back as well, and reached out across the intervening space to poke Ethan in the shoulder. “You _wish_ you could kick my ass.”  
  
“I’m a ninja,” Ethan said haughtily. He folded his arms behind his head and grinned up at the sky. “I can kick anybody’s ass.”  
  
“I’ve been meaning to ask you about that,” Vance said. He unknotted the bandanna and starting shaking the sand out of it. “So you’re really a ninja?”  
  
“Of course.”  
  
“It’s not just a Halloween thing?”  
  
Ethan looked at him. There was no censure in the other boy’s voice, merely curiosity, and he thought about how this was the first time since Halloween that he’d been in costume around someone else. The guys, the other bullies, they were awesome and everything, but they didn’t understand how it was. They didn’t _get_ it. That feeling of being in the wrong time sometimes, the longing. No one really got it.  
  
Looking at Vance, those wide, green eyes, he thought maybe Vance got it. He wouldn’t have come otherwise.  
  
“It’s not just a Halloween thing,” Ethan said. He sat up. Vance wasn't looking at him anymore, but there was an odd expression on his face. Like he was nervous, a little belligerent. He'd dusted the sand off of his eye-patch and put it back on, almost like he felt more comfortable wearing it, and his black frock coat was scuffed in places, obviously well-worn. Ethan took all of this in, Vance's expression, the wear-and-tear of his clothes, and said, "It's not just Halloween for you either, is it?"  
  
There were seagulls crying over by the docks, and somewhere out in the bay a foghorn sounded. When the wind shifted, Ethan smelled salt, and underneath that the rather less savory odor of the barge docked next to the industrial park. For a long moment, he thought Vance hadn't heard him, and he was about to repeat himself when the other boy suddenly sat upright and scooped up a handful of damp grey sand.  
  
"I take a rowboat out to the shipwreck sometimes," he said. He still wouldn't look at Ethan, was instead watching the sand trickle from his closed fist. "There's an island there, but no one ever goes on account of it's so far. Sometimes I make a little fire there. Got a grotto I can put stuff in, nothin' too fancy." He glared suddenly at Ethan, his face red. "If you tell anybody this, I swear to God I'll break your fucking neck."  
  
Ethan didn't respond. He was thinking about a lone figure in a rowboat, the same figure crouched on a darkening beach, warming his hands by the light of a tiny fire. He said, "Sometimes I sneak out in the middle of the night and jump around on rooftops."  
  
Vance blinked. "Dressed like that?"  
  
"Yup."  
  
"How d’you get up there?"  
  
Ethan shrugged. "I climb up the side of the building."  
  
"In town and everything?" Vance asked, and when Ethan nodded, he gave a long, low whistle of appreciation. "That's pretty tough, man. You could get killed doin' shit like that."  
  
Ethan shrugged again and pulled off his gloves so he could dump out the increasingly itchy sand. "A true ninja has no fear of death." He paused. "I've never told anybody that. About the rooftops, I mean."  
  
Their eyes met and something passed between them then. Acknowledgment, perhaps. Some sort of recognition.   
  
There was a reason they'd found each other.  
  
Ethan pulled his gloves back on, shoved to his feet, and offered his hand to Vance. "Are you ready to finish this?"  
  
Vance grinned up at him and allowed Ethan to haul him upright. "Fuck yeah, I am," he said. He didn't immediately relinquish his hand, and even through his gloves Ethan could feel the warmth of that touch.  
  
They each pulled on their respective headgear -- mask for the ninja, bandanna for the pirate.  
  
Ethan cracked his knuckles and twisted his spine until it popped. He readied his stance in the sand. "Shall we dance?"  
  
A flash of white teeth. "Dance?" The swirl of an oversized black coat. "I'll dance in yer grave!" And the pirate laughed and rushed him.   
  
***  
  
This time, the fight was more relaxed. Almost playful. Ethan felt himself slipping in and out of character, one moment an agile ninja dodging the pirate's jab only to land a solid blow in return, the next just Ethan again, snickering helplessly as Vance put him in a headlock and tried to noogie him through the mask. The ninja was a disciplined fighter, Ethan moderately so, the pirate even less than that, and Vance...Vance was a whirlwind of random, undisciplined energy, like he was making up for his height by being utterly insane. At first, they followed the rules and mostly tried to knock each other down, but eventually Vance tackled him and they went rolling to the sand again. By the time they came to a halt, Ethan's mask was halfway off his head and Vance was sprawled on top of him.  
  
"Ha!" Vance crowed. His eye-patch had miraculously stayed on, and his one visible eye was bright with victory. "I _win_!"  
  
Ethan managed to unpin one of his arms enough to pull his mask the rest of the way off. "Not a chance," he said. "The rules were that the first man left _standing_ won. We're both down, we both lose."  
  
"Whatever, cupcake. I'm on top, so I'm the closest to being upright. I win."  
  
"...'cupcake'?"  
  
"What, you got a problem with cupcake? I could go back to calling you ninja-boy if that's what you want."  
  
Ethan laughed. "That's okay," he said. "Cupcake is fine." Vance still hadn't moved, his elbows planted firmly in the sand on either side of Ethan's head, bodies flush, their faces close enough that Ethan could feel Vance's breath on his lips, and somehow he wasn't surprised when the other boy leaned down abruptly and kissed him. Nor was he surprised that instead of pushing Vance away, he just kissed him back. No, what surprised him was how _normal_ it felt to kiss him, and on the heels of that thought came another: _he tastes like mint._  
  
Vance had brushed his teeth before coming to fight him. There was something weirdly endearing about that.  
  
The first kiss segued into a second, segued then into a third, and by the time Vance finally pulled away, Ethan was feeling thoroughly mussed and more than a little minty himself. If Vance thought anything amiss about the whole thing, he certainly wasn't showing it -- in fact, he looked rather smug, like Ethan's state of dizzy breathlessness meant he was the _shit_.  
  
"I win," he chanted softly against Ethan's lips. "I win, I win, I win."  
  
Ethan's hands had found themselves in the small of Vance's back. Easiest thing in the world to spread his legs a little and let the other boy settle between them.  
  
"Just because I kissed you back doesn't mean you win the fight," Ethan said. He couldn't stop smiling.  
  
Vance bumped their foreheads together. "Who said I was talkin' about the fight, cupcake?"   
  
It occurred to Ethan then that this, all of this, the fighting and the notes in class and even the stupid peg leg, was Vance's bizarre way of flirting with him. It explained the winking, at any rate, and the way Vance's eyes sometimes went hooded and lazy when he smiled at him. What it didn't explain was the weird flutter in his own stomach whenever he saw that smile, or why he was loathe to let the other boy get up.  
  
Had this been his way of flirting too? Like certainly attracted like...  
  
"So," he said. He slid his hands underneath the coat and into Vance's back pockets. Vance made a quiet, happy sound and gently bit Ethan's lower lip. "What is it you win, then?"  
  
It was Vance settled warmly on top of him and Vance's mouth that kept brushing his, but it was the pirate who answered.   
  
"Arr,” the pirate said. “Booty."  
  
“ _God_ , you’re a dork,” Ethan said, and kissed him again.


End file.
